A generalist.

That is how I like to think of Taylor Jenkins Reid – in the finest, most classical, sense of the word.

Throwing caution to the proverbial wind, slinking into any number of worlds, she is the kind of author who manifests emotional resonance wherever she goes: everywhere from the Fleetwood Mac-y land of singer-songwriters, via Daisy Jones and the Six (which later became a sensitive series, starring Riley Keogh) to the string-and-racket backdrop that filled Carrie Soto is Back (a tennis tale that’s been optioned by Serena Williams, quelle surprise). She valiantly rode the waves in Malibu Rising (a surfing novel) and also glided her way into old-school movie stardom in The Seven House Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (arguably her break-out novel, it’s also en route to getting the series treatment, via Netflix.)

Her latest? It soars even higher. So high the L.A.-based author recently solo-ed on the cover of Time (the first author to do so in six years) – proof of her own “brand” status. Jenkins Reid is herself the story, no matter what ether she is entering. This time? Space itself. Titled Atmosphere, and set in the 1980s space program, her latest happens to be both a taut thriller and queer love story. Proof, perhaps, that she really can do it all.

It’s a page-turner, for sure – one that hinges on the journey of Joan Goodwin, an astrophysicist who joins NASA’s space-shuttle program, and whose life is upended when she meets Vanessa, a mysterious and magnetic aeronautical engineer. But, palpably, too, it’s a book that grapples with big, existential ideas, like the “immovability of the stars.” As one of her characters puts it: “Nothing you and I could do will ever alter them. And they will not change within our lifetimes. We can succeed, or fail, get it right or wrong, love and lose the ones we love, but still the Summer Triangle will point south.”

Here, Jenkins Reid talks love, her latest literary world and her own experiences with the stars.

SHINAN GOVANI: You are always so sharp when it comes to a sense of time and place – so I have to ask right off the bat: What came first, the idea of setting a novel in the space program, largely at Johnson Space Center in Houston, or returning to the 1980s, a period you’ve covered before? 

TAYLOR JENKINS REID: So many of my books are about the way women are confined to certain expectations, and how do they make the world bend to those expectations? And one of those areas is the space program. I started thinking about women in the space program, and what would be an interesting time to set this story. And the way I wanted to tell it could only be told in the early 1980s, when women [astronauts] were still new to NASA. I also wanted to explore a connection between one character in space and another on the ground.

SG: You write in a forward to the reader that before you started writing this book you could barely recognize the Big Dipper, which reminded me that when we spoke about your novel Malibu Rising, you said you had zero clue about surfing before writing it. Are you just insatiably curious?

TJR: That’s what it is! I am just very curious about the world around me and, certainly in the past several years, have taken the approach in life that you don’t know what you are interested in until you try it. So with the stars, I had never studied. I had never really stood outside at night and looked up, trying to make sense of what I was seeing in any sincere capacity. But I knew that I wanted the main character, Joan Goodwin, to be an astronomer. In order to be even considered for the space program you have to be incredibly accomplished in another field. 

So I started with an app on my phone, and going out every night to have a look. Now, I am happy to say, my daughter, husband and I all go out, especially in the summers, and look. And I now know what I’m looking at without the app.

SG: In terms of studying the stars, tell me some of your Google searches.    

TJR: It’s funny. When you start to look at the stars, you quickly come across what that constellation is, and the meaning behind its name: a lot of it comes from Greek mythology and then you start to understand the zodiac signs, why we talk about a Virgo moon or Sagittarius rising. The constellation I became quite besotted with is Scorpius. It looks like a Scorpion. And there is one particular star in Scorpius, toward the centre, that has a reddish hue. That is Antares, it’s a nice big one, it takes up a lot of space and is easy to spot.

I loved finding out how astronomy changes over time and how it is different for different civilizations. They have different words for it and ascribe different meanings. It tells us a lot about ourselves.

SG: Celebrity is a recurring subject in your books – but a celebrity astronaut is a particular beast. What did you want to convey in terms of the psychology of someone who becomes famous for essentially going to space? It strikes me that astronauts are usually introverts, but also situational extroverts? 

TJR: In the time this book takes place, all the astronauts are being called upon to represent the best of American virtue. This is an American program, the government has expectations about how they represent its idea of America. There is a lot of pressure as you have to follow a set of virtues defined by someone else. Societal expectations, and the way all of us bump up against them, is a theme that I keep coming back to.

SG: There is one lovely line in your book: “People say opposites attract, but Joan had found this to almost never be true. People just couldn’t see the ways they were drawn to exactly who they feared – or hoped – they might be.” Talk to me about that.

TJR: Joan is thinking that there is a lot she does not know about herself. She thinks she is talking about other people. What she has observed, what she does not know is she is talking about herself. I’m very taken by Joan’s approach to love – which is to say she does not have a lot of experience with it, feels maybe above it and wonders what happens when she surrenders to it … I think the reader knows before Joan knows, and I think there is something kinda sweet about that.

SG: You live with your characters, you’ve said, long after a book is complete? Care to elaborate.

TJR: It’s not something you can turn off. They are a bit like ghosts who are with me all the time in some way. In order to write them, I have to love them and understand them. I don’t necessarily like them, or like the things they do, but I understand them to such a degree they just become a part of me. I am, for instance, a different person today than I was before I started writing this book because I had to ask questions as Joan Goodwin would – in her open-hearted way of viewing the world. That became contagious to me.

SG: Speaking of identity, this book has big queer energy. And in your recent Time magazine cover interview, you describe your own bisexuality. What has been your reaction to your fans’ vocal reaction?

TJR: The thing that has felt the most reassuring to me, frankly, is how much the reaction has been: Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious. Because I always felt it was clear in my work, and that I didn’t need to say it. The other element is that I do feel a little freer. I don’t think I realized how, on some level, I was still trying to be someone’s idea of something. Saying it in such a public way, I feel like my authentic self. Within my marriage, my family, I have always been very safe to be my full self, and I know not everyone has that. I have a husband who fully embraces all of me. I never take that for granted.

SG: Finally, this is your biggest book, in scope; but it’s among your most intimate. Unsurprisingly, it was just announced that Atmosphere is going to be a film, adapted by filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who did Captain Marvel…

TJR: And Half Nelson (with Ryan Gosling), which is one of my favourite movies! This is a story that is very intimate, but also vast in scope, yes. Boden and Fleck are good in scope, obviously, but they also are incredibly good at rendering those tender moments in which there is nothing that needs to be said. It’s rare to find a team that can pull off both of those things, and I am very, very excited to see what they do.